Tempest in a Lavatory : Laguna Beach Festival Denies Firing Woman Because She Did Not Clean Men’s Room

LAGUNA BEACH —  Bernice Harris considers herself a hard-working employee and a lady. But she has her limits.

For 45 summers, she cleaned the grounds of the Festival of Arts, a well-known art show that runs here every July and August. Then last year, she says, a supervisor gave her a task that she wanted to refuse: to clean the men’s restroom while it was occupied.

“There were too many men in there,” said Harris, 65. “I was so embarrassed, I just cried. I didn’t want to look at all those men; it wasn’t nice for a lady.”

Harris says she performed the job for two weeks. Then she used her own money to hire a male friend to do it.

This summer, she was told that her services would not be needed for the new season, an action she contends was retribution for her reticence to follow her supervisor’s order. This week she filed a lawsuit accusing festival officials, among other things, of unfair termination and sexual harassment.

“I don’t think that any woman should be exposed to men’s genitals while on the job,” Harris’ attorney, Elaine Norton, said. “It’s a little strange; any woman would be upset at the thought of having to go into a urinal.”

Festival officials deny that Harris ever was required to clean an occupied bathroom. She was terminated, they say, for economic reasons unrelated to her job performance.

“She was a valued employee,” said Tim Wilcox, the festival’s media and marketing director. “There was a sense that she was part of the family. It would be unthinkable to me that she would be forced to clean the men’s room with men in it. That would have been uncomfortable not only for her, but for the men who came into the restroom, and it’s not our way of doing things.”

Harris’ job was eliminated, Wilcox said, because of the $500,000 damage at the festival site caused by a mudslide last year that followed a devastating wildfire.

“Because of that, we were looking at tighter budgets,” he said. After finding an outside vendor who would do the maintenance work for less, Wilcox said, the festival terminated Harris in what “really was a bottom-line consideration. It was not meant in any way to be a slap in the face directed at Bernice Harris.”

Harris’ lawsuit, filed Monday in Orange County Superior Court, paints a different picture.

Festival officials refused her entreaties that the men’s room be locked while she worked, Harris says. Instead, they suggested that she put up cones outside the door to discourage users.

But men ignored the cones, she said. The lawsuit alleges that Harris suffered humiliation and emotional distress.

Norton declined to say how much money her client seeks in compensatory damages for the pain that she suffered. The point of the lawsuit, she said, is not money but morals.

“It’s just not right,” the lawyer said. “It’s more the injustice of the thing. I’m filing to gain the justice that should be rendered her so that she doesn’t just go off into the sunset without anyone noticing what happened to her.”